I love road trips.  There’s nothing quite like piling your essential shit into the car, grabbing a friend or three, and heading off into the great, wide yonder.

I’ll be honest, while some parts sucked (you’ve heard the best of those stories), the overall vacation was actually good, and I was, as always, sorry to leave. After the first week, I got more relaxed and had a pretty good time.

But that’s not nearly as funny as the vacation from hell parts.

Because I stayed until the very end, I had to clean up my room.  This wasn’t a big deal, except for the part where I had to go back in the bathroom with the spider from hell.  I opened the door just a crack, and peered in.  Nothing jumped at me.

I packed up my stuff and cleaned up a bit, all without seeing the spider in question.

Until I went to empty the garbage can.  Sitting right on top of the garbage was the spider.  (Admittedly, in daylight, and NOT JUMPING ON ME, the spider was smaller than I remember, and turned out to be brown, not black.)

That was the end of me emptying the garbage.

Later on it was requested that I put the garbage can outside so the spider could leave.  I took the can outside, and as my last act of “communing with nature”, I dumped the can out, shook the spider out of the can and over the edge of the deck, and picked up the garbage.

The little fucker had built a web inside an empty toilet paper tube.

I’m ready to go home.

My last night.  Oddly enough, I don’t really want to leave.

I went to bed late (around 4 AM).  Last stop before bed: the bathroom.  As I turn to close the bathroom door, this gigantic, beefy black spider launches itself from the vicinity of the toilet, LANDS ON MY CHEST, then launches itself back into the vicinity of the toilet.

I used the other bathroom.

I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here.

The golden mantles are now so close to tame they’ll come right up to us and beg. Or, if you leave your oatmeal bowl sitting next to you, they’ll come right up and help themselves.

Note: they only do this when The Squirrel is not around.

I am the minnow whisperer.

For the second day in a row we went out on the boat, cruising around the lake, trying to use up the last of the fuel. We stopped at Part Time Point again (still an island), and took a swim out to the buoys. Last time we were there I found a small fish which seemed to be living in or around the buoy. I wanted to see if it was still there. After sitting quietly for a few minutes, the fish appeared and swam around me. Yay!

My compatriots were at the next buoy out. As I swam over to join them, I saw a bug, trapped on its back because it’s wings were stuck on the surface tension of the water. I wasn’t sure what to do about this because I couldn’t tell if it was a bee or a bee mimic. (A type of fly that looks like a bee.) I was trying to get a better look when all of a sudden a small fish came up from the depths, and mostly swallowed the insect in question. I say mostly swallowed, because the butt end (where the stinger could possibly be) was sticking out of it’s mouth. And then the little fucker turned and swam straight at me.

Suffice to say there was a LOT of screaming and flailing. (I’ve never been stung by a bee and I don’t intend to start now, thank you very much.)

At that point I was done with the water, but the fish weren’t done with me. A small german speckled trout decided I was its new home, and spent 50 yards or so hanging out in the crook of my arm, in my cleavage, and being shooed away from my nether regions. Any flailing resulted in the fish disappearing for a moment, before it came back to hang out again. It was very cool.

We put out peanut butter for the rodents. They lost their fluffy little minds.

I didn’t need the Klonopin.

The cabin comes complete with its own local fauna, and mornings begin with “The Chipper Show”, where the Gentleman in the Red Shirt sets out handfuls of peanuts, and we watch the local fauna lose its collective mind.

There’s an assortment of blue jays, a couple of robins, and the occasional tiny beautiful birds that flit past making lyrical little cheeps. But the real highlight of the cabin fauna is the rodentia. The primary players are The Squirrel, an assortment of golden mantle squirrels, and a handful of chipmunks (chippers).

The Squirrel is some sort of grey ground squirrel and it is the king of the roost, announcing its presence with a loud series of barks, which it seems to use as a way of indicating its territory, telling off blue jays and other rodentia when they get too close to the peanuts, and telling off the humans when there are insufficient peanuts. The Squirrel is a complete psychopath, chasing off other rodents, (we’ve seen it come damn close to catching a chipper), as well as the birds. And when I say chase off the other birds, I mean it climbs up the tree they’re sitting in, and leaps, barking, onto the branch the bird in question is sitting on. When the bird flies away, it will occasionally leap from branch to branch trying to follow it, screeching as it goes.

The chipmunks are the smallest players in The Chipper Show, and some years they’re the predominant rodent population at the cabin. This year there are only a handful, and in their place we have hordes of the slightly larger golden mantle squirrels. The golden mantles are smaller than The Squirrel, and mostly not as aggressive.

The first day I was present for The Chipper Show, a golden mantle decided it wanted some of the peanuts, and tried to go and grab one, but half way across the back deck, it got startled, and froze. For 20 minutes. The Gentleman in the Red Shirt and I made all sorts of jokes about it having a kernel panic, a blue screen of death, and other assorted computer lock up issues. After 20 minutes, the golden mantle finally turned around and left. Over the next couple days we saw this performance repeated, and it became evident that this is some sort of golden mantle survival strategy.

It also became evident that there were a bunch of golden mantles running around, which got named as we became able to identify them. In order of size from largest to smallest: Segmentation Fault (Seg Fault), General Protection Fault (GPF), Kernel Panic, and Core Dump. Kernel Panic is sort of a catch all for the ones that we can’t identify. We’re pretty sure Core Dump is an adolescent, and Seg Fault is pregnant.

My trip got better as we found more non-Nature intensive things to do. Like driving around on dirt roads, looking at old gold mines, and exploring an abandoned town with old graveyards. (Oddly enough, one of the graveyards had tombstones going back to the 1850′s and tombstones as recent as the late 1980′s. Who came back to bury these people?)

As the weather cooled down and made lake involved activities less appealing, I finally began to relax. A couple days were spent driving down to Quincy for supplies (and, admittedly, the cell reception). A couple afternoons involved a beach I’d never known about before, that didn’t involve a boat or a hike through the woods. (The beach wasn’t even on a rock outcrop!)

Eventually I’d settled in enough that when the Gentleman in the Red Shirt suggested a foray into creek walking, I actually agreed. This time I started smart, I took my Klonopin before I left. (Yes, I took to tranquilizing myself before my forays into Nature.) The whole thing went very well, with me climbing up and down embankments and tromping through both the creek and the woods. Real woods! No road, no trail, just me, trees, and dirt comprised mostly of rotting deadfall. It was AWESOME.

That’s right boys n girls, I hiked, I tromped, I climbed, I got dirty, I got scratched, and god dammit, I didn’t cry. This could be the start of a non-aggression pact with Nature. (Maybe.)

All through the miracle of “better living through chemistry”.

We’re supposed to try a field trip back to the lake and the boat today. I’m bringing my Klonopin with me.